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The British Academy have announced details of a call focusing on Cities & Infrastructures, funded through the Global Challenges Research Fund, with a deadline of 14 June 2017. This call is subject to Official Development Assistance eligibility criteria (Ed – see the end of the post for more details)

The call will support interdisciplinary projects which address the challenge of creating and maintaining sustainable and resilient cities in developing countries. The call has four sub-themes (taken from British Academy website):

“a) Planning: In the context of the large, dispersed and unplanned cities of the global south, planning for resilience becomes a matter of collaborative initiative involving a host of actors and sentient infrastructures. This requires mobilising plural and interdisciplinary knowledges, both for understanding and for acting in intelligent ways.

b) People: Human vulnerability and resilience go hand in hand. The poor are deprived in plural ways, but also forced to become resilient subjects, making use of the city and their know-how in imaginative ways.

c) Infrastructure: Cities are held together by infrastructures, which also instantiate and regulate social life in quite strong ways. In the global south the infrastructures are broken, incomplete, badly regulated, underfunded and often reliant on vernacular improvisations. Technical solutions alone will go only so far, and are expensive.

d) Habitat: The urban habitat is central to resilience, in the form of lived experience, the consequences of emissions and heating, the formation of symbolic and public culture, the consequences of urban architecture and design. This is an obvious terrain for interdisciplinary work on jointly making sense of how habitats can be managed as a silent form of ‘atmospheric’ regulation.”

Projects in the region of £300k will be supported, and the British Academy anticipate that these will last for up to 16 months with start dates in September 2017. You can access the scheme notes here.

If you are interested in applying for this call, please contact your Research Development Manager in the first instance who will be able to advise on your eligibility and the specific requirements of this call.

About ODA Eligibility Criteria

The Cities & Infrastructure Programme aims to support the “economic development and welfare of developing countries.” Only research that has a primary objective which is directly and primarily relevant to the problems of developing countries may be counted as ODA. We will require applicants to demonstrate that the proposal is ODA eligible. ODA eligibility is an essential criterion – projects will only be deemed eligible for funding if they can demonstrate that they satisfy ODA eligibility criteria. The British Academy, with the other Global Challenges Research Fund delivery partners, have provided an additional ODA guidance document for applicants.